The Virtue and Iniquity of Tech
Myself in Cluny Journal
I have long asked for better criticisms of tech. Yesterday, my criticism was published in Cluny Journal. The most important question the technology industry fails to answer is the question of virtue. What does virtue mean to us? Why should we pursue it? And do we even know how to build virtue?
I’m enormously grateful for Cluny Journal for editing and publishing the essay. They are an outstanding example of the kind of permanent institution tech lacks.
The tension between commerce and virtue was a familiar topic for the ancients. In Plato’s final work, The Laws, Cleinias asks the Athenian Stranger, widely considered a stand-in for Plato, whether or not to found a new city by the sea. He advises against it. A city “right on the sea, with a good harbor,” he says, would require “some great savior, and some lawgivers who were divine, to prevent it from coming to have many diverse and low habits.”
With constant economic and cultural exchange comes the endless introduction of new people and customs. The generally transient nature of the population fosters cultural disruption at a previously unimaginable pace.
When writing this article, I tried to balance insights from Plato, widely known observations from San Francisco, and my own opinion.
San Francisco’s beauty, spectacle, and terror is unique. Tech is ascendant across economic, political, and cultural domains. Founders like Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk are playing a critical role in deciding elections, shifting the cultural mood, and refactoring the nation-state. But apace with their ascendence, San Francisco’s tech leaders are looking inwards. They are becoming self-aware. They are reckoning with the Gomorrah-like price of their city.
Things brought me to an aporia. Can the drifter savants of San Francisco be saved? In the long term, SF’s dysfunction and success appears difficult to separate.
You’ll have to read the full article for the answer:
